What are you doing now?
I have been working as a product manager for the last two years in the only particle and fiberboard production site in Switzerland, the SWISS KRONO AG.
How are you helping?
The main focus of my job is the furniture board portfolio and the connected collection of the designs. By creating the new collection I analyse the current trends and out of them I define the current and future needs of our living spaces. By matching the trends, needs and our decors I enable people to use Swiss-made furniture boards in their homes.
In close collaboration with our Quality Management, Laboratories and the R&D department our products are optimised to fulfill the market’s demands. These products require different documents, including certificates, data sheets and marketing material. Together with the above mentioned departments and others I coordinate and organise these documents, making sure our sales team can work smoothly.
In addition, I help my organisation to work towards a Circular Economy. The awareness of sustainability, especially for wood-based products, is growing. Since the wood industry isn't as advanced in process optimisation and automisation as, for example, the metal industry, I am also able to take part in the creation of new and optimised processes, especially in connection with new tools, like ERP-, PIM- or other digital-systems. The goal is to run a resource-efficient plant and to play a leading role in the wood industry in the Circular Economy in Switzerland. The involvement in different process creation and projects enables me to see further into the whole system of SWISS KRONO and to understand everyday what impact a simple decision can and will have.
To summarise, I am not only a product manager but also a project and process manager.
What tools are you using?
To understand our customers and the end-user I work with customer journeys, observation techniques as AEIOU, brainstorming sessions, interviews and reflection sessions. These tools enable me to define the needed product combinations, the new collection, possible additional tools and also new products. The collected information helps me to justify new ideas and to launch customer-oriented products.
For the information gathering and process definition I use primarily MAKIGAMI, a process visualisation tool optimised for production sites. In order to coordinate my own tasks and my projects I use different tools to encourage my colleagues to try something new too and keep my synapses engaged.
